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Loop

The Duck Pond Feeds the Beds Now

Rev 2 · Sat Jun 13 · supersedes Rev 1 · history

We dug a pond for the ducks. A season later it was the closed-loop engine feeding the raised beds, the gravel filter, and the fish tank — nothing leaves the system.

The Loop

  1. The Duck Pond duck-fertilized pond water ↓ to The Barrel
  2. The Barrel pond water + fermented cow dung + fine compost + comfrey liquor + JADAM ↓ to Coarse Filter
  3. Coarse Filter coarse-filtered nutrient brew ↓ to Raised Beds
  4. Raised Beds feeds the crops; the excess drains away ↓ to Bed Drains
  5. Bed Drains spent drain water ↓ to Gravel Bed
  6. Gravel Bed biologically filtered water ↓ to Swirl Filter
  7. Swirl Filter water with the solids spun out ↓ to Aquaponic Fish Tank
  8. Aquaponic Fish Tank fish-enriched water ↓ to Return Line
  9. Return Line water carried back to the start ↺ loops back

The duck pond turned out to be the engine nobody planned for. We dug it for the ducks and the geese, and within a season it was feeding the beds.

The brew starts in a barrel: pond water the birds have already fertilized, plus fermented cow dung, fine compost, a comfrey liquor that smells like the end of the world, and a JADAM-style ferment. It gets a coarse filter — a feed sack, honestly — and gravity-feeds the raised beds.

What the beds don't drink, they drain. That drain water runs through a gravel bed (the bacteria do the quiet work there), then a swirl filter spins out the solids, and what comes through is clean enough for the aquaponic fish tank. The fish add their own enrichment, and a return line carries it back to the barrel to start again.

Nothing leaves. The pond's overflow, the kitchen's compost, the cow's manure, the comfrey we'd otherwise have to cut and bin — all of it loops. We swapped the sand filter for a swirl filter after the sand kept clogging, and that one change is why it still runs unattended for weeks.

Update after the first freeze: the loop slows but does not stop in winter — the fish tank is the warmest mass in the system, so we route the return line past it last on cold nights.

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works/duck-pond-loop · Rev 2 manyarks-rev/1+sha256 d070278f680787fc…